The Dark Glamour

by Gabriella Pierce

  She stood up and pressed two fingers hard into the space just below each cheekbone, allowing the pressure to pull her together. “Okay,” she whispered, starting forward, but she hesitated just as her hand was on the door that led back to the atrium. They call it an “atrium,” but it’s not really, her inner architect observed. Its light came from the glass walls around the four sides of the house and an enlarged skylight in the center, but there was still one level above it, shaped like a hollow square. And so the staircase behind her led down to the floors that she had just explored, but another set led up, as well, to the real top floor of the mansion.

  The floor where she keeps her nasty secrets.

  The memory of pain and fear shot through every nerve of her body. But a flood of absolute conviction followed close behind it, and Jane knew where she had to go.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The stairs to the attic weren’t carpeted, and Jane carefully set each toe and heel down together to avoid unnecessary noise. The scent of pine and dust filled her lungs, and she was sure her hair would smell musty by the time she returned to the party.

  The first door at the top of the stairs led to what looked like a child’s playroom, but Jane knew better than to get excited just yet. It may look like it’s for a child, but I know it’s for Charles, she thought ruefully. She blinked her spell-covered eyelids a few extra times, just in case. She knew she had guessed right when nothing stood out to her enhanced vision, but she still felt a pang of disappointment.

  The next room was set up like a classroom, with just one lonely student desk under the sloping roof. I wonder if they brought in teachers, Jane thought idly, trailing her fingers across the dusty chalkboard. Charles had spent his entire life in this attic. The household staff knew about him, of course, but would Lynne have allowed in outsiders? Jane imagined Sofia, the Dorans’ tiny, bulge-eyed maid, standing at the front of the room lecturing a drooling Charles on geography.

  Of course, he probably would have needed a doctor sometimes, too, Jane realized pragmatically, and, as if the attic were attempting to answer her questions, she opened the next door to find what looked like a hospital room transported into an Upper East Side attic. Man, she thought, shuddering and hurrying along, when Lynne decides to keep a secret, she doesn’t screw around.

  The next room, opening to the right rather than straight ahead, contained a massive flat-screen television, a squishy-looking couch, a floor-to-ceiling shelf stacked with approximately every board game ever invented, and Charles. His stringy brown hair hung over his eyes, which Jane remembered as flatter, duller copies of Malcolm’s. His intimidating bulk was crammed into a corner of the couch as if the other three-quarters of it were off-limits, and his meaty hands were full of Stratego pieces. At the soft creak of the door opening, he looked up, and another piece fell out of his slack mouth.

  “Jane,” he announced happily. “My friend Jane.”

  Jane flinched at the sound of her name, and held her hands up to her face. The long, sturdy fingers were still the same walnut-brown, and her hair was still in its longish, smooth bob. Her fingers fluttered over her cheekbones, nose, and lips, but they all seemed to still be firmly Ella’s. Her disguise hadn’t suddenly disappeared . . . Charles just didn’t see it.

  “Charles,” she said levelly. “You remember me?”

  He jumped heavily off of the couch, and she reached behind her to make sure the door was still open in case she needed an escape route. But he shuffled away in the opposite direction instead, and after a moment of counting all the things that could go wrong, Jane clenched her hands into fists and followed him. Charles was both unpredictable and not fond of bathing, so she kept her distance, but he seemed entirely focused on his self-appointed mission.

  When they reached what had to be his bedroom—all the toys that money could buy, but shabby with madness and neglect—Charles became a little more agitated, rooting around in the top drawer of a sturdy white dresser and sending a few pairs of socks flying. With a triumphant-sounding gurgle, he pulled out the object of his search, and Jane blushed furiously: he was holding the lacy red thong he had accepted as a bribe for helping her escape from the attic the last time she had been up here. “Jane,” he repeated fondly, stroking the scrap of lace like a cat.

  “I told you I would come back,” she improvised, although she couldn’t remember if she had ever actually said that. Charles was watching her intently, and she had no idea what those empty-looking eyes might see.

  “Charles,” she began again, sending a probing finger of her mind toward his, “I need your help again. You helped me so much last time, I know you can do it again.”

  “Friends help,” he mumbled, ambling over to sit on his twin bed. But he wouldn’t look at her, and Jane, filtering through the top layer of his mind, realized that Lynne had been furious with him after Jane’s escape. She clearly hadn’t suspected that Charles could have helped Jane intentionally, which had probably saved him some real pain, but she was still his mother, and her rage had been painful enough for him on its own.

  “It won’t be like last time,” she assured him, hoping fervently it was the truth. No matter how badly Charles had frightened her in the past, she didn’t want him to suffer. “I just wanted to know about your older sister. Can you tell me about Annette?”

  “I have a brother,” Charles told her uncertainly, sliding one hand into his pocket. Jane remembered that he liked to carry around the old Yale key chain Malcolm had given him, and sincerely hoped that this was what he was fumbling around with in there. “He had a sister.”

  They never even met, Jane reminded herself; no wonder he didn’t really understand that they were related. There would be no point in trying to find pictures of Annette in Charles’s head; Charles had only been conceived in the first place because Annette had died. Or so they thought. “Did he tell you about her?”

  Charles shook his head no and began rocking gently back and forth on his bed. Jane raced through his mind, pausing whenever a young version of Malcolm came into view, but she wasn’t even entirely sure what moment she was looking for. She knew how Annette had looked at the age when she had supposedly drowned, but if Charles had ever seen a photograph of her, he had buried the memory deeply. Of course, there’s nothing remotely organized about his mind, anyway, she thought testily. There were no connections between his thoughts that she could understand or follow, and his memories tumbled at her mind like plaster raining from the roof in an earthquake.

  Suddenly, Charles jumped up off the bed, and Jane jumped back. But he just shuffled toward the room’s other door, gesturing vaguely for her to come with him. She knew that she should be getting back to the party; she had already probably spent too long on this wild-goose chase. But she couldn’t help herself. Now that she had come face-to-face with the sad, broken boy she had once thought of as a real-life boogeyman, she felt an overpowering need to see whatever he could show her. She stepped carefully around what looked like a pillow fort and followed him.

  Two rooms later, they seemed to have left the part of the attic that was meant for Charles. The room I was tied up in must be around here somewhere, Jane realized with a chill. They had taken the shortest route to the stairs that time, which hadn’t led through Charles’s living space, but there was only so much attic left between where they were now and the other side of the staircase. We’ll take the long way back, Jane promised herself absently. Then she noticed that Charles had stopped. At the sight of the room he had led her to, Jane stopped in her tracks as well and stared.

  The walls were lined with shelves, which were filled with orderly rows of boxes. The boxes on the floor formed considerably less orderly stacks; there was probably room for a person to walk between them, but it didn’t look entirely safe to try. Most of them didn’t have lids, so the corners that weren’t perfectly aligned sank into the boxes below, creating Tower of Pisa–esque stacks of cardboard that wound first one way, then another. Each one was labeled with initials, and Jan
e could see papers, ribbons, trophies, clay sculptures, and stuffed animals peeking out of the gaps between them. Evil psycho witches keep crayon drawings?

  Apparently, they did: at least some of the boxes were marked “MWD.” Malcolm Walter Doran. She held her breath as she dug one of them out of its stack, but although there was some dangerous wobbling, she managed to get to it without knocking anything over. A model of the solar system, a bunch of notebooks, and a single shin guard were inside; Jane spun Saturn thoughtfully. “They never throw anything away, do they?”

  “Sister.” Charles shrugged, digging with a yellow fingernail deep scratches into a corner of one of Blake Helding’s boxes.

  Jane smiled in spite of herself: in his own strange way, Charles kept coming through for her. Plus it was kind of nice to be recognized, especially by someone who isn’t currently trying to kill me. She knew how important it was, and that it was quite temporary, but after two weeks of seeing a stranger in every mirror, her disguise was starting to get to her. If it weren’t for Jane’s face periodically popping up next to Malcolm’s in various tabloids, she felt she might start to forget what she looked like: it was already hard to remember the contours of her real eyes.

  “Do you know her middle name?” she asked hopefully, but she had already begun to search through the stacks. Charles was too busy widening the hole in his box to acknowledge her question, but it didn’t really matter: Jane knew she would recognize two out of the three initials. She wandered haphazardly through the piles of boxes, trying to make sure she saw all their labels. They were all so similar that they blurred together, and she suspected that she was covering the same territory multiple times. One of the boxes even seemed to glow a little, and Jane blinked a few times. But her vision didn’t clear: the box was brighter than the ones around it, as if lit from within. Jane craned her neck until she found the marking on it: “ALD.” Jane spun around, trying to take in as many of the boxes as she could at once. Two others were glowing faintly as well, and she felt a silly grin break across her face. Three boxes of Annette’s things—things that she didn’t intentionally give up—way more than I even need.

  She pulled one out and began rooting through it, but it was mostly clothes: practical shirts and shorts, stylish tunics and leggings, and a blue velvet dress with lacework that took Jane’s breath away. “The world’s best-dressed six-year-old,” she muttered, replacing the box in its stack. Clothes probably weren’t personal enough, she guessed: whatever she used had to be something that Annette would still have considered “hers” no matter how much time had passed. She pulled the next box off one of the shelves along the wall, and it was a gold mine: a leather jewelry box full of silver chains and stick-on earrings, two pairs of jelly shoes, a doll that looked homemade, five dusty, velvet-lined boxes with glass figurines in the same style as the unicorn that Jane’s first spell had broken, and a stuffed rabbit so worn that it must have been laundered thirty times. There was even more underneath, but she didn’t bother to dig through it.

  “Thank you, Charles,” she whispered sincerely. He stayed half-hidden behind a stack of boxes and still wouldn’t look at her, and his shyness made her feel extra-brave. She tugged a pretty knot-work ring off her left pinky, held her breath, and tiptoed over to him. She thought she saw a faint smile on his slack face when she pressed it into his grimy palm. “I have to go now,” she told him, backing away again and staring hard at the ring. Not mine anymore, she thought firmly, for good measure. Not connected to me at all. “But this is yours now, and I’ll be back to visit as soon as I can. You’re a really good friend.”

  As she heard herself say the words, she realized that she meant them. She ran lightly down the back stairs with her box, which she could hide just outside the back entrance and pick up later without being seen. She knew from experience that no one at 665 Park Avenue ever bothered with the stairs.

  And then all I need to do is survive the rest of the party, Jane reminded herself cheerfully. Being glared at by witches and suffocated by André still wasn’t her idea of a pleasant evening, but it suddenly seemed a lot more bearable.

  Chapter Twenty

  Jane rubbed the worn gray fur of the toy rabbit with one thumb. The box and the rest of its precious contents sat on the floor beside the closet, and she crossed her legs on her down comforter and tried to keep herself from bouncing in excitement. She had been so eager to examine her prize that she hadn’t even bothered to change out of her black dress, although she had kicked off the glittery shoes at the earliest opportunity.

  It had been even harder to shake off André after the party than it had been during it, but as soon as she had returned to the atrium, she had repeated the words “food poisoning” in every context and combination she could think of, and finally he had given up. It couldn’t be that hard to believe, after I’d run up and down all those stairs, she admitted to herself. When they’d reached the mirrored hotel elevator, she saw just how thoroughly she’d failed to touch up her hair and makeup before hurrying back into the Dorans’ party. No wonder he let me off the hook; I wouldn’t want to sleep with me tonight, either. But all she could feel was giddy happiness: nothing was going to stop her from finding Annette now.

  She dropped the rabbit gently onto the comforter, where it stared at her with one glassy brown eye. Can I do this myself ? She hesitated briefly. Maybe I should wait. After all, the first time she had done this spell, she’d had two Wiccans, tons of crystals, and a vial of tasteless but potent goo. But she was keyed up and nearly bursting with magical electricity. There was no way she would be able to sleep tonight. As the power buzzed through her veins, it whispered to her that, as long as she had enough magic, everything else was just props.

  She closed her eyes, counted seven deep breaths, and let her mind drift toward the small stuffed toy. Feeling slightly foolish but wanting to re-create what little of the original spell she could, she held her arms up, creating a circle around the rabbit with her hands meeting each other on the far side. She held the magic inside of that, spinning it around the circle’s edges like water in a funnel. She couldn’t remember what Misty had chanted, so she substituted a meditation mantra of Dee’s, focusing on the rhythm rather than the meaning.

  Although her hands remained raised, after a few minutes she could physically feel the synthetic fur, the plastic whiskers, the black glass of the eyes. She could very nearly feel the oil left behind in Annette’s invisible fingerprints from every time the girl had picked up, hugged, or carried the bunny. Jane sent her mind along their tight whorls, following them to an identity. Tell me where she is. Show me Annette.

  A buzzing noise so low that she hadn’t noticed it at first intensified until she wished that she could cover her ears, and then her consciousness was wrenched violently away from her body. Although she had prepared herself for the pain this time, it seemed to have multiplied. Should’ve drunk the goo, she gasped mentally, wishing she were still in her body so she could be sick. But there was nothing she could do except wait for the pain to pass, because wherever she was, it was no longer the Lowell Hotel.

  So where am I? Where is she? Jane tried to look around, but felt frustrated all over again by her inability to so much as twitch of her own volition. She had to wait for Annette to move, turn, hear, look. At least this time I know whose body I’m in, she reminded herself. Without the confusion and then the shock of discovering that she had mistakenly inhabited the body of a girl who was supposed to be dead, Jane felt sure she could stay there long enough to see something useful.

  When Jane’s vision cleared, Annette was slicing lemons into wedges. A cheap-looking paring knife cut methodically into the yellow peel over and over, separating it into quarters and then eights. So “something useful” is still a ways off. Jane tried to focus on her peripheral vision and could tell she wasn’t in her dingy, depressing apartment; this space looked bigger and darker, although early morning light sifted through a small window in the background. A bar, she guessed, straining her ey
es to see the corner of something that might be a jukebox. Annette swept the lemon pieces into a white plastic bin, and Jane tensed in anticipation. But the girl just pulled another lemon from a different bin without even needing to look up, sliced the fruit in half, and began again.

  You’ve got to be kidding me, Jane tried to shout, but Annette’s jaw didn’t so much as quiver. I pull this spell off all on my own, and you’re going to spend the whole time doing mise-en-place? She didn’t know how long she would be able to stay this time, but lemons were too universal to help her one bit.

  Annette finished her slicing, swept the pieces into the bin with the rest, and turned. Jane clenched every non-corporeal muscle, in her excitement, and then relaxed them into a disappointed heap: Annette was only looking for limes. They were a bit farther along the bar from the container that held the lemons, but as soon as she located them, Annette dropped one on her cutting board and carried on with her incredibly dull work.

  I saw something, Jane realized after a few moments of watching the knife slide through the translucent green flesh. There was something . . . look back!

  Annette finished cutting her lime, dumped the pieces into an empty white plastic container, and turned away from the bins and the cutting board entirely. Jane felt her own muscles pull and joints pop as her host body stretched hard, her hands clasped over her head and her back arching like a bow. Annette’s field of vision was now largely consumed by rows of variously shaped glasses, fanciful bottles of liquor. Behind the bottles, she noticed a dusty, black-spotted mirror. It showed a dark room full of wooden booths and benches, as well as an outlined rectangle of white-gray light.